Making Times Square’s Pedestrian Plazas Work

So the pedestrian plazas in Times Square aren’t going away. Last month’s tabloid flap over topless women and costumed panhandlers prompted William J. Bratton, the city’s police commissioner, to say he’d like to rip the plazas up. The mayor, Bill de Blasio, didn’t disagree, calling for a task force to study ways to improve the square.

Its report is still forthcoming, but City Hall has meanwhile made clear that the plazas, an initiative by the former mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in fact will not be undone. They improve pedestrian and driver safety, a priority for Mr. de Blasio, boosting commercial rents in the process. By entertaining their demolition, Mr. de Blasio looked as if he were pandering and clueless.

Besides, while drivers grumble about Midtown gridlock and hotel and theater owners understandably worry about perceptions of deteriorating conditions spoiling business, the mayor should know as well as anyone that big cities are speeding trains. New mayors jump on, and their job, more often than not, is to curb the desire to pull the emergency brake.

So instead of plowing the plazas, Mr. Bratton has assigned a special unit to monitor Times Square. There hadn’t been one, perhaps partly because the neighborhood had become so safe. During the 1980s, a City Hall official told me, police officers averaged some half-dozen felony arrests each day on one block: 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Now there’s an average of one felony arrest a day for the entire district, which helps explain the swelling volume of tourists, office workers and troublemakers.

Better policing should solve much of what now ails Times Square, especially if the city also establishes voluntary registration for the costumed characters and new rules for plazas that were once streets. This will allow them to be regulated more like parks and other public places, with areas cordoned off for desnudas, the nearly nude women in body paint who pose for tips, and enough chaos left to make sure Times Square remains Times Square.

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An abundance of Mickey Mouse characters.CreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Architecturally speaking, the true impact of the plazas is impossible to judge because they remain only half-finished. The other day, Craig Dykers, a founding partner of Snohetta, the firm hired five years ago to design the plazas, showed me plans for improvements yet to come, including widened sidewalks along a repaved Seventh Avenue. The design’s lack of bells and whistles derives from an understanding of the rough-and-tumble from hundreds of thousands of people passing through the square each day. The plazas cede drama to what’s happening in and around them. They aren’t especially pretty. Still, the scheme makes sense of a complicated geography. It needs to be expeditiously completed.

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, a business group, is now rightly urging City Hall to go further and stake out a cultural vision for the plazas, and by extension for public space all across town. The Bloomberg administration created plazas in underserved neighborhoods. The de Blasio administration can build on that legacy, not just by installing more of them around the boroughs but also by tapping into New York’s cultural and creative infrastructure, using the reboot of Times Square as a template.

Sherry Dobbin, creative director for the alliance, imagines a tightly organized program of changing street furniture, food, performances and art installations. There are too many crass moneymaking events and ugly kiosks cluttering the plazas, especially with all the disruptive construction going on. Times Square needs not just targeted policing but better management, which requires involvement by city agencies. What’s devised, Ms. Dobbin said, could be adapted to plazas elsewhere.

Like all mayors, Mr. de Blasio inherited unfinished business, which wasn’t all to his taste. That’s how New York has always evolved. The Manhattan street grid, conceived in 1811, opposed by many powerful landowners, took decades to complete. It was imperfect. But generations of successive mayors and other civic leaders tinkered, riffed and saw it through. New York has become what it is as a result.

Shortsighted politicians seek cheap points playing to voter amnesia and impatience. A few years ago I visited Bogotà, Colombia, where TransMilenio, a rapid bus service instituted by a mayor named Enrique Peñalosa, had become the envy of progressive cities around the globe. But by the time I got there, the still new system was already breaking down, a victim of its own success, overcrowded and dangerous. The mayor who followed Mr. Peñalosa failed to carry out promised extensions and upgrades, allowed roads to deteriorate, left riders to contend with delays and crime, and pushed an alternative vision. Antanas Mockus, Mr. Peñalosa’s predecessor, likened the problem to “raising another man’s child.”

Big ideas take time. Complicated cities like New York face long-term challenges. Climate change, income inequality, an aging infrastructure and a struggling school system require vigilant and continuous leadership.

Times Square does, too. To his credit, Mr. de Blasio now looks as if he is picking up the mantle instead of a sledgehammer.